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[Colloquy Moderator]

Between the two world wars, the principles of academic freedom and faculty governance were established largely to protect academe from outside interference. Have those needs changed? In an essay in this week's Chronicle Review, Stephen H. Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars, argues that, as the humanities and social sciences have increasingly diverged from the natural sciences, they have become more "adversarial" and less "collegial," and now require new governing structures to protect them from themselves and to promote intellectual diversity. Are the two cultures really that different? Should there be different rules for hiring, firing, establishing graduate requirements, or admitting students? If so, where should the differences lie? And who should determine them? Read more ...

[HV, Mundane State]

This article warms over Kuhn's paradigmatic versus preparadigmatic formulation.  For Kuhn, the "sciences" are regarded as paradigmatic; the social sciences (possibly even the humanities) regarded as preparadigmatic.  I think calling the sciences "collegial" and the others not is probably misleading, however.  "Scientists" often fight like crazy with each other for prestige and grants, at times even bending science to do so, as ethnographies of science have shown.  Some social science departments are so enmeshed in crude positivisms that would put even Comte to shame (also driven no doubt by grants) that there's no room for anything qualitative or interpretive.

Although the author wants to fix this in some way, it's not clear that anything he proposes would really change anything.  Lurking in the background of this article is a proposed (but common) shamefacedness at the lack of paradigm (in my mind a good thing) in the humanities and social sciences.  I, for one, am tired of seeing social science take a lickspittle posture toward hard science.  Social sciences appropriately use bits of science, but are refreshingly not as yet anchored in an overarching paradigm.

[TR, Physics Dept at U of Mich]

The reason the social science and the humanities lack a paradigm is because, by definition, there can't be a paradigm.
Only true sciences (e.g., physics or chemistry) can have a paradigm because only they have any standards.

The social sciences and humanities are based on speculation, emotion, and guesswork.  The notion that social sciences use a bit of science (as stated by "HV") is complete nonsense and shows HV hasn't the foggiest idea of what s/he is talking about.

Science tries to establish proof for observed phenomena.  Although empirical evidence can be convincing, it is by far the weakest form of proof.  The best form of proof is formal---i.e., mathematical---but proof by repeatable experiment is also accepted.  Humanities have no experiments per se, and the closest the social scienes come to being technical is the use of statistics---which means the "experiments" aren't repeatable.

Besides, the social sciences---unlike the real sciences---are agenda driven.   You first pick some outrageous belief that you want to prove (like women only make 75% of what men do).  Then, you go out and gather "evidence" to support that belief.  Any evidence that doesn't support the agenda is ignored.  And this is science?

Humanities are even worse.  They have nothing whatsoever to prove.  Look at some of the crap that is called "art".  And there is some kind of paradigm here?

HV is probably in the social sciences because people in that field always try to pawn themselves off as being "scientists" so they can claim credibility.  Well it won't work.  

Always remember that any field that has the word "science" in its title isn't one.

[HV]

I'm always amazed by the fact that most physical scientists (at least in this country) have absolutely no knowledge of philosophy of science.  Trumpeting superiority is not a valid argument for the vaunted preeminence of these disciplines.  TR has no knowledge of my background, so suppositions about what it is are anything but "scientific."

I have noticed this:  scientists who are actually brilliant have a sense of humility about what they are doing.  Sometimes, social scientists (yes, we can be arrogant too) have a proper sense of tentativeness about what we are doing-- probably because our proofs, such as they are, tend to be contingent, stochastic ones.

[S. Peterfreund, English, NU]

Before we descend into paradigm envy--or its opposite--let's pause to consider what Kuhn intends by the term.  A paradigm is a theory that obtains until a sufficient incidence of anomaly shows it for what it in fact is:  an intellectual (or ideological) formation that has powerful but limited heuristic value.  No wonder, then, that Kuhn likens the process of science to that of systematic theology.  Every edition post 1962 that includes the important "Postscript" is clear on this matter.

So Balch (and Gross and Levitt) duly noted, what is serenely objective about science?  And why should it proceed uninterrogated after all the data-cooking scams of the last two decades, while the humanities and social sciences are brought up on charges?  The quick and dirty answer would seem to be that data-cooking is apolitical, while disputes in the other two fields are not.  That's simply not true in an era of Big Science.

Balch's tired plaint is that the rambunctious academics of the left have marginalized moderate and conservative intellectuals.  If being one such means performing source studies, allusion checklists, painfully descriptive surveys of the literature, or quixotic exercises in cultural literacy, then perhaps identity criticism or marxist literary studies is a welcome alternative.  But no one who pursues what their antagonists contemptuously label red literary studies ever claimed that ecocriticism--green literary studies--has no place in the conversation.

Indeed, in claiming there is no place for his kind at the table, Balch earns that place with a latter-day reinscription of the captivity narrative--in this case, the intellectual captivity narrative.  And the cultivation of pieties and fomenting of hatred that were often the result of reading the earlier form of this genre are not far below the surface of what Balch has to say.

There is a lot of hearsay from the right about the satanic activities of the academic left.  Would it be asking too much to demand some hard evidence of these activities?  And a body count might not be a bad idea either.

[D. G. S. Schweik]

TR a "scientist" notes that: "The social sciences and humanities are based on speculation, emotion, and guesswork. The notion that social sciences use a bit of science (as stated by "HV") is complete nonsense and shows HV hasn't the foggiest idea of what s/he is talking about."

I suppose that TR's scientific observation is an example of how a scientist empirically approaches questions as compared to a lowly humanist/social science worm.  

BTW, I don't know what miniscule micro sub field that TR plows - but, my suspicion is that the journals and scholarly meetings that s/he reads and attends are filled with the usual human vitriol to the point that most of the work is largely “speculation, emotion and guesswork."  

Given the above, IMHO this reductio ad absurdum about science vs. the humanities/social sciences makes about as much sense as a WWE match.   I've had the pleasure of knowing some folks on both sides of the fence that are genuinely interested in looking at a problem.  They've been able to synthesize science, social science, arts and the humanities -- as a result they've made a real difference in their respective fields.  IMHO an original thinker can and should draw from diverse sources.  Scholars that possess that particular gift are the ones that produce genuine paradigm shifts - be it in the sciences, social sciences, arts or humanities.

[%sig%]

[Observer]

Apropos your request for an example of political bias, how about the wholesale subscribing to the blank slate model of the human mind, so that the degree of cultural constructedness can be foregrounded and expanded--all in the face of the conclusions of evolutionary psychology?  Pinker has left the concept in rubble but many still desperately cling to it and resist the unavoidable conclusions of science with regard to human 'nature' (in key senses of the term) and its realizations that more conservative interpretations of human behavior fit the scientific facts more closely than more 'liberal' ones.

How about the privileging of literary texts by writers from favored minority groups and the related sidelining of any questions of literary quality as fair game for literary discussion?

[HV]

Actuallly Pinker's Blank Slate is pretty weak.  Clearly, he makes some valid points when he says that the brain isn't really a blank slate.  Conceded.  But then Pinker promptly jumps to all kinds of nonsense-- the idea that we're pretty atavistic is "confirmed" when the crime rate goes up slightly during a police strike in Montreal.  He shamelessly glosses everyone from Hobbes to Freud.  BS has the usual evolutionary psychology problem of posing a grand theory that can't really be disconfirmed.  Then barking that it's truth, using a pastich of carefully selected (and often remote from human) examples.  In the case of this volume, the theory winds up frankly endorsing conservative politics as "closer to human nature."  I'll happily conceed that the silly left radically believes in human reengineering and ignores muich of our capacity for aggression, but wights like Pinker turn a blind eye to massive successful instances of human cooperation, such as Norway...

[N.P]

Several commenters here have lambasted social science as being "unscientific". I beg to differ, and challenge any detractor to simply peruse and top Journal in Economics (e.g, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economics & Statistics).

What they will find is that economics has a very convincing methodology for an empirical science that takes seriously issues of parameter identification, causality, and the specifications underlying the reduced forms and structural relationships implied by a very mature theory.

There is even a vibrant and ongoing program in experimental economics that validates the discipline as a laboratory science.

As for results? A very large part of  our lives has been conditioned by findings in economic science---from auction theory that has led to the explosion of innovation in telecommunications, to the design of program evaluation mechanisms based on econometric methodologies developed by the Nobel Laureate James Heckman.


Given that economics as a discipline has as its purview far more complicated phenomena than that in any "Natural Science", achievements in economic science represent the epitome of man' achievement.


----N.P

[Patrick Jung, Prof, MSOE]

Ah! How I long for the Middle Ages after reading these postings!  Back in the 1200s, theology reigned supreme in universities.  Of course, back then, there was the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy) for undergraduates, but all these disciplines were designed to prepare students for a more complete understanding of the King of Disciplines: theology.  

Yes, during the Middle Ages, academics did not concern themselves with seemingly pointless questions concerning human society; they were interested in the ultimate power in the universe.  Nor did they concern themselves with the physical world and its mechanics.  They left that to alchemists who sought to turn base metals in gold (and who discovered much about chemistry along the way), and barbers who, in addition to cutting hair and shaving beards, practiced medicine and sought to cure the human body.

Yes, theology dominated the medieval university.  What I find most amazing about the work of medieval academicians is the persistent significance of their work.  Indeed, the understanding of God that they worked out in the Middle Ages is generally the same understanding that people in the West still possess today (at least those who profess the existence of God).  I should also note that this was not a purely Christian activity.  Muslim scholars such as Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd did the same for Islam, and their work greatly influenced Christian thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas.

A few people have expressed outrage over TR's remarks. I, on the other hand, feel sorry for him/her.  If his/her opinion of the humanities and social sciences is that low, he/she is a very shallow and empty person.  Indeed, I have given the briefest of outline concerning our contemporary understanding medieval theology and its transmission in early universities.  Of course, the study of history and the methods that it employs are crucial to such an understanding.  Indeed, historical knowledge is only gained through years of archival work that entails sorting through literally thousands of documentary sources.  Even then, the historian will often attain only the most preliminary and basic understanding of the world that produced those sources.

Does TR REALLY think that such research is a waste of time?  Does he/she really believe that the study of the past and how it influences the present is nothing more than (and I quote) "crap?"  If he/she does, well, I can only express pity.

Is there a lot of fluff in the humanities and the social sciences that is worthy of criticism?  No doubt, there is.  However, it is a small, vocal, and generally untalented minority within these fields that produces the provocative fluff.  The vast majority of us work in obscurity, away from the glare of sensationalism, and research questions that actually tell us more about what it means to be human.

To wrap this up, let me quote Camille Paglia a well-known right-wing feminist (an oxymoron? Hardly!):

"The modern disciplines of knowledge, far from being covert forms of social control as the leftist poststructuralists tediously claim, have rescued ancient objects and monuments from neglect and abuse and have enormously expanded the record of our species." (Wall Street Journal, 9/30/99).

Yes! The ghosts of Byzantium arise from their graves! St. Thomas Aquinas, patron saint of scholars, rejoices in the City of God!

[T. Runic, Physics, U. of Texas]

I have no idea where this stupid, idiotic idea came from that social sciences or the humanities have diverged from science.  They never had anything, at any time, in common with science.

Professors in the humanities and social sciences have a perpetual inferiority complex.  And its well deserved.  I always laugh when people in the sociology department or psychology department refer to themselves as scientists.  Whenever I hear them say this, I now forcefully interrupt them and, in no uncertain terms, remind them that they are not---and never will be---scientists.  Indeed, for someone in the social sciences to refer to themselves as a scientist is an insult to those of us who truly are scientists.

This points out something that is equally idiotic: the premise by the author that the social sciences and humanities have diverged from science.  How can the former---which is based on emotion and opinion---be equated with the latter that relies on experimentation and rigorus proof of hypothesis?

The is only one inevitable conclusion:  the author is in sociology with one of those inferiority complexes!!

[Observer]

Dear HV,

Thank you for a balanced response.  I appreciate your desire to avoid overarching paradigms.  The left's ongoing admiration for the French Nietzscheans may not amount to a full blown overarching paradigm, but it certainly amounts to something like an overarching preoccupation which tends to exclude other approaches.  Postmodernism has been compared to a religion in that it has an arcane vocabulary and language, a priesthood, a willingness to believe in the irrational, and a tendency to punish infidels.  Obviously not all religions act in this way, but you get the point.  The continuing opposition to such things as logic, fact, and evidence does have its coercive side.

Bias need not involve a strict party line to exist.  Social history, e.g., which now constitutes (what-85%?) of 'history' in the academy, focuses on a certain set of issues to the exclusion of others and continuously hammers home the same points.  Students are brought up believing that the principal role of a historian is to uncover instances of oppression, discrimination, etc.

Many students now opt out of Ph.D. programs because the faculty therein have a narrow set of concerns rather than a broad set of interests.  The concerns are not uninteresting or unimportant but they so dominate the field as to represent a form of bias.  This is particularly insidious, because it restrains the study of other important fields.  Literature programs, e.g., are fixated on issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, postcolonial perspectives, etc. etc.  Students wishing to explore other things (genre, literary history, the history of ideas, biography, technical bibliography, major writers and so on) feel marginalized and leave (or don't matriculate in the first place).  There is talk about 'making space' for the marginal, but what has happened is that the space for the more traditional has been removed.

One can overstate this, of course, but it is hard to deny that many things have occurred which are undergirded by points of view that lean left.  Prior to the war the academy in the U.S. was often predominantly republican; now it is predominantly democrat, at levels of 90% or more in the professoriate, while the general population splits down the middle with a floating swing group in the middle.  This is all quite apparent and its effects are clear.

[S. Peterfreund, English, NU]

I am saddened to see so many lowlanders attempting to play Harold Bloom's bagpipes and succeeding so badly.  How can we know how to value literature by hitherto un- or underdiscussed writers and groups until we have suspended the canons of "the tradition" long enough to have the discussion?  By the logic that holds that those who wish to pursue genre studies and bibliograpical work are being unfairly passed over by those interested in identity criticism and other recent critical trends, we should all go back to philology, which was unfairly passed over by literary history, history of ideas, and the new criticism.

Change happens, and it happens in physics as readily as in literary studies.  Newtonian mechanics may still send a rover to Mars accurately enough, but its explanation of bodies, forces, and motion fits uneasily in a unified theory of physical phenomena.  Descriptive bibliography may play a useful part in developing a new historical argument, but bibliography is not the measure of literary discourse.  The analogy is deliberate:  theories have life spans, but the useful technologies that those theories give rise to may persist for some time after the theories' demise.  So students may still do "traditional" literary studies--even philology--but not as ends in themselves.  In fact, as ends in themselves, those pursuits come in for the same critique that the likes of Marcuse and Feyerabend have levelled against all unreflective "operationalist" undertakings, up to and including the physics of P. W. Bridgman.

[DE Teodoru]

The social sciences are made up of people who were forced in the course of their education to come in contact with the physical sciences. Many genuinely prefer social sciences and verge to them. But I would posit that most are in social sciences because they could not cope with the rigors of "hard" sciences. This leads to something of an inferiority complex, particularly since social sciences have proven of little REAL WORLD redeeming quality when compared to hard sciences.

Social sciences seem to attract people with socialization problems and something of the "Hitler-need." These folks are not able to keep up scholarly effort and postpone gratifigation of ego as long as research scientists. So they have a tendency to attempt attention seeking with weird theories. These are rarely substantiated or argued. Rather, they are pontificated. The experience of standing at the front of a grades-hungry class of students is very conducive to conditioning to the swollen head syndrome.

Thus, the empty theories of the social sciences tend to reflect the pecking order in the field and on the campus, establishing forced fads instead of just putting forward notions for scholarly scrutiny.

Most universities have their name carried by the physical sciences side of faculties. But the profs' union often imposes on the university similar salaries, fascilities, services and perks for the social sciences, irrespective of their utility and productivity from the point of view of the society at large. It is worth remembering that the social sciences began, not as sciences, but as popular ideologic catechism for the masses. In communist countries, I would remind, a field of social sciences for which a graduate degree was offered is "activist."

I do not want to undermind the vital intellectual contributions of social sciences; but too often this is impeded by the doctrinaire and totalitarian politics in these fields. Too often the "this is it" quality of social science notions are just manifestations of in-field political power.

Still, let me be clear as to my view. Social sciences, even though rarely real sciences, are basically very much empirical analysis in depth of social phenomena. As such they are vital philosophical entities. The problem is that too few social science academics are honest and too many are ego maniacs with no intellectual morals or standards.

[Psychologist]

I think this feature of the Chronicle should be renamed "Straw Men Unlimited." I am consistently impressed by the unsupported and completely inaccurate assertions that are made in nearly every discussion I read. Here's a good one from this discussion:

"the wholesale subscribing to the blank slate model of the human mind"

Huh? Subscribed to by whom? The "blank slate model of the human mind" has been discarded for decades by mainstream psychology. For what it's worth, the mainstream "paradigm" is the biopsychosocial model. Get a grip, folks. Can we ever have a reasonable, fact based discussion in here?

I found the original article that led off this discussion somewhat difficult to interpret. It seems that what Balch is proposing is a sort of affirmative action for conservative academics in the social sciences and humanities. If this interpretation is correct, this is a radical proposal deserving of sober reflection and discussion. Some of the posts in this discussion actually have addressed Balch's arguments, but most have veered off into the familiar territory of disciplinary chauvinism and histrionic mud slinging.

[%sig%]